Kerry Packer by Michael Stahl (i read books .txt) 📕

it farther than Australians playing each other. ‘Let’s get the world’s best cricketers to play Australia’s best.”

A world series for cricket.

With Lillee and Chappell doing the recruiting, Richie Benaud doing the schmoozing, and the base rate for players set at a staggering $25,000 per year for a three-year contract, the maverick series had signed up 35 of the world’s best players in complete secrecy before news of it finally escaped in May, 1977.

Cue the sound of smashing brandy snifters. And the pffft! of a fuck-you Fanta.

For many people, Australians included, their first real consciousness of Kerry Packer came via his appearance on The Frost Programme in the UK on 2 June 1977. Interviewer David Frost—who already knew Packer well—had pitted the cricket-promoting pariah against Sunday Times cricket writer Robin Marlar.

It was the Aussie upstart versus the establishment toff. Packer, far from being coarse and bullying, was ice-cool and confident with his quips, while Marlar escalated to a spit-soaked fundamentalist. The interview ended with the audience cheering for cricket’s ‘super-test’ to go ahead.

Naturally, many Brits saw it differently. ‘The circus may last a season or two—there are good reasons for thinking that it will be no longer than that—and it may do much harm to the game,’ sniffed Britain’s The Spectator on 10 June 1977.

Packer’s poke at a world series would have to go all the way to England’s High Court. In September 1977, the attempt by the International Cricket Conference (aka ‘the establishment’) to ban Packer-aligned players from the game was defeated. The ICC’s tilt at Kerry Packer reportedly ended up costing $320,000.

If anyone had thought rounding up (eventually) 51 of the world’s top cricketers would be Packer’s biggest challenge, there were still greater obstacles ahead.

Packer’s ‘circus’ was frozen out from those cricket grounds administered by the Australian cricket authorities. It was forced to look at other sporting venues like Melbourne’s VFL Park where, compared with the manicured nuances of a cricket pitch, the surface was an Amazonian jungle.

Expert horticulturalists were engaged to cultivate cricket pitches off-site in huge concrete trays, to be trucked into place. Even then, the final few metres of their journey would require steel plates to protect the surrounding grass from the weight of the vehicles.

It was during an evening inspection of VFL Park, where footballers were training on the floodlit field, that Packer and Cornell hit on the idea of night cricket. Putting this into practice, however, would necessitate the design and construction of lighting towers for the other venues, including the Sydney Showground. Night cricket even meant changing the colour of the ball.

With every brainstorm, cricket traditionalists bristled.

It’s a matter of history that in its first season, World Series Cricket looked like it would crater. Packer had revealed during the High Court case that he had committed to investing $12 million into the game. Yet everyone could see, live on Packer TV, that the first matches were struggling to pull in a few thousand spectators each.

The face of cricket was changing. The television coverage was in a different league, with cameras at both ends of the pitch, and eight cameras in total to relay unprecedented detail. So, too, the field microphones that were buried near the stumps, protected from the damp earth by being stuffed inside condoms.

At the second Supertest, played at the Sydney Showground, David Hookes’s jaw was shattered by a ball from the West Indian bowler. Seeing the severity of the injury, Packer personally bundled Hookes into his Jaguar sedan and raced him the kilometre or so to St Vincent’s Hospital.

Strangely, Hookes’ misfortune sent a powerful message to cricket fans: WSC wasn’t playing pretendies. Another consequence was that batsman’s helmets would soon become commonplace in cricket.

In those countries where cricket is played, the argy-bargy continued over whether Packer signatories should be allowed on their national teams. The West Indies lifted its ban, then Pakistan, but England and Australia remained firmly opposed. The Australian WSC side was still forbidden from being called ‘Australia’.

The turning point for WSC occurred at VFL Park in Melbourne in late January 1978, as the first season drew to a close. Its first night game, a limited (40-over) match between the Australians and the World side in December, had still only drawn a modest crowd of about 6500. But the concept of city commuters meeting their families after work to watch an evening of cricket became etched in the public’s minds.

When the night game returned to VFL Park in January, almost four times as many spectators turned up. Similar turnouts over the following two nights’ play confirmed that World Series Cricket had indeed, to quote Cricketer magazine editor Eric Beecher, ‘turned on the lights’.

There was no stopping WSC after that, especially with its weapon for the 1978–79 season: a television jingle turned sporting national anthem, C’mon Aussie c’mon. Its authors: Allan Johnston and the late Alan Morris, of Sydney agency Mojo.

As World Series Cricket grew in spectacle, urgency and colour (with the ‘pyjama’ uniforms introduced in January 1979), its crowd figures rocketed. The Supertest final of the 1978–79 season, played under the Packer-prompted (and controversially, State-funded) lighting towers of the Sydney Cricket Ground, drew 40,000 spectators over three days.

The ‘official’ Australia-versus-England Test was hosted at the very same venue just one week later. It attracted a crowd of just 22,000, over four days. Packer’s gut-punch to the ACB had truly hit home.

And WSC wasn’t just great sport—it was spectacularly good television business. According to Nine’s annual report for 1978-79:

‘Cricket added one point each hour of broadcast towards Nine’s Australian content quota whilst drawing between half and three quarters of the available audience. Tests and One-Day Internationals have won their slots 99 per cent of the time. A mini-series that received similar ratings would cost around 80 times as much to produce and even a cheap “soap” costs some 16 times as much.’

Outside of Packer’s orbit,